ChatterBank1 min ago
A4 Piece Of Paper
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It's a discussion firstly of the properties of A-series paper, in particular how halving it produces the same shape again; then a fun journey down to the cellular, and then the atomic, and then the subatomic and Planck scale -- and back up again.
Similar concept videos have been done before, it's weird to see it linked to paper though!
Similar concept videos have been done before, it's weird to see it linked to paper though!
Bednobs; difficult to precis. We start with a sheet of A4 paper and keep halving it until we are within the atom and beyond.
Then we start to double she size of the A4 until we are among the stars and beyond.
I think my few words have managed to capture the essence of the awe that can be felt contemplating all this! :-(
Then we start to double she size of the A4 until we are among the stars and beyond.
I think my few words have managed to capture the essence of the awe that can be felt contemplating all this! :-(
Depends on how seriously you take "think". It's vastly beyond our capabilities right now. But in barely the last hundred years, our understanding of the Universe has increased so vastly, in either direction, it's scarcely possible to do it justice. But, in one direction, we didn't realise there was more than one galaxy until about the 1930s, and now we know of hundreds of billions of them; and in the other, we didn't realise that atoms had structure until 1910, and now we are probing the inside of the protons and neutrons that are billions of times smaller than those same atoms.
Within our present understanding, sure. I'm sceptical of there even been any other intelligent life to communicate with in the first place, since it's arguable that multicellular life arose on Earth as an accident rather than an inevitability. Still, assuming that hurdle to be crossed, there's no way that light-speed communication is plausible. As to anything beyond that... I wouldn't care to say. I think it's extremely unlikely, or at any rate whatever would be necessary is beyond my imagination. Faster-than-light communication would appear to break causality, so the only way around it is if there existed some sort of cosmic "short-cuts", connecting two points in space that would otherwise be too vastly separated to allow communication.
But the main point is that "impossible", or anything equivalent to it, is a dangerous word in science.
But the main point is that "impossible", or anything equivalent to it, is a dangerous word in science.
